Field Mapping

A crucial step in creating an import is the ‘Field Mapping‘ feature.

Field mapping is the process of defining relationships between fields in your CRM data and corresponding fields in the Houzez theme. It involves creating rules that specify how data from your CRM should be translated and populated into the fields in your Houzez property listings.

This ensures that information such as property details, prices, locations, and descriptions are correctly and accurately imported, maintaining the integrity and usability of your property listings.

If you’re importing from a CRM where the field mapping is already setup by us because we’re aware of th structure of the data, field mapping also gives you control and allows you to override any of the default mapping we have in place.

This guide will walk you through the process of setting up and managing field mapping rules to ensure your property data is imported accurately and efficiently.

Accessing field mappings

When editing an import you’ll be able to access field mappings from the left hand tab:

Creating field mapping

Here you’ll be presented with the ability to create a number of rules regarding field mapping using a form like so:

If the format being used is XML or CSV, on the right hand side you’ll have a list of all the fields we found in the external file:

These can be dragged and dropped into the relevant textboxes to aid with creating rules.

If the format being used is a common CRM format and not a bespoke XML or CSV file, you can simply enter the name of the field in the data.

Using the XML example above, you can see it’s found a node in the XML called ‘/price/amount‘. If we wanted to set the price field in Houzez to this we could create the following rule:

This is saying “If the price field in the XML is equal to anything (i.e. using the * wildcard character) then set the ‘Price’ field in Houzez to the value of the price field in the XML“.

A slightly more complex example might be as follows:

In the above example we’re checking the ‘featured‘ field in the XML, but instead of using the * wildcard character, we’re looking for a specific value of ‘Yes’. If that’s the case, then we set ‘Featured’ in Houzez to ‘1’. Notice how the last field is now a dropdown. This is because there are a finite number of options available for this field.

Once you’ve specified your rule, click ‘Add Rule‘.

Managing existing field mappings

Any existing field mappings will be shown here too:

From there they can be edited, cloned or deleted.

Additional notes about field mapping

If importing from an XML or CSV file you must create a field mapping rule for at least either the post title, post excerpt or post content. Otherwise WordPress will fail to import the property and will write to the logs accordingly.

If importing from an XML file, the XML fields are referenced using the XPATH syntax. This is an industry standard way of referencing fields within an XML file and lots of guides can be found online about this (i.e. https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xpath_syntax.asp).

With the XML format, one of the most common issues with field mapping is that people select the wrong node for the ‘Repeating Property Node‘ and ‘Unique Property ID Node‘ fields: